A Deviant's Diary

Glimpsed through his experiments with his father's Leica, Zorki and Pentax Spotmatic cameras, these images document, as he puts it: "the contortions and convulsions of that phase", when he was kicked out of school, and spent a pleasurable time in the company of musicians, hippies, and other assorted deviants. It is a visual diary of all that surrounded him at that time—friends, family and urbanscapes: old girlfriends brooding in the gloom of his bedroom, his actor-activist mother and art critic-writer-artist father, self-portraits composed when he was coming down from acid trips, and the bell-bottomed students of St Stephen's College swaying at parties. "The freshness of an untrained eye was exciting to see," says Bartholomew. "With experience I've become comfortable, confident, to produce images, but the fuzziness and the bad lighting have their own drama, and create another expression."

Curators and critics abroad have certainly held the same view. Bartholomew's early work got critically-acclaimed outings at the prestigious Noorderlicht and Rencontres festivals in Europe last year. At the latter, ironically, it was displayed alongside the work of upcoming Indian photographers trying their hand at the same thing: photographing their family, their friends, themselves. But Bartholomew's images are as buoyant as the others are mannered and stilted. "It's become the fashionable thing to do," says Bartholomew. "It's often done in a forced, self-conscious manner. But my endeavour was much more free-spirited."